2771 There's no title that fits barrettes, choking, and consumerism.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

The north pole is in Lapland.

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You know you've screwed up when the second thing people say to you in greeting is "What happened to your hair?"

I've had a breakage problem. The top layer of my hair doesn't seem to grow past the bottom of the back of my head. I'd thought it was from overuse of heat straightening back in early 2007, but that should have grown out long ago.

I finally figured out it's because of those stupid "French clip" barrettes - the ones with the bar that goes up between two metal strips to hold the hair tight. I hated them when they first appeared on the store shelves a few decades ago because I knew they'd break hair, but they're about all you can buy now. I have many beautiful ones, and now I'm going to get rid of them all. I'll use scrunchies and simple bar barrettes from now on.

Two weeks ago I cut my hair to just above my shoulders, so it will all grow out together.

Males, in particular, don't like it short. They prefer it long, even if it is ragged.

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"The Doctors" today were demonstrating infant CPR. When Daughter was small, we weren't taught CPR for little ones. I was reminded of one day when I was going through the mail. Daughter was sitting on the floor next to me, and I was dropping the envelopes on the floor for her to play with.

Suddenly she began choking. One of the envelopes had a cellophane window, and she'd somehow managed to pull it loose and inhale it.

I couldn't see or reach it, it was pretty far down, so without thinking I turned her upside down, held her against my body by her legs, and pressed on her middle with the other hand, and ran for the front door. The next door neighbor was a retired pediatric nurse, so I ran to her door, holding Daughter upside down, punching her in the chest constantly, planning to ask the neighbor to call 911.

I rang the doorbell and kicked the door and shouted, squeezing Daughter upside down the whole time. Daughter managed to cough up the cellophane far enough that I could get to it, so I lifted her high by one ankle and reached into her mouth to scoop it out before she could inhale it again. Just as the woman opened the door, I got the cellophane out and Daughter started wailing.

The neighbor opened the door to me dangling a kicking squirming screaming child upside down by one ankle, in front of my face. The expression on Mrs. Tribble's face was priceless.

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I've been watching "The Age of Stupid" online. (I'm about 2/3 through it, and just now discovered it has been removed for copyright violations - which I don't understand because the distributors will give you a free copy if you agree to show it to multiple people.) It's a British production about global warming, supposed to get the message across better than "An Inconvenient Truth". (The producers seem to have an intense dislike of Shell Oil in particular.) All the pre-2055 clips shown are actually real archival footage from various sources, not shot just for this movie.

Anyway, one statement impressed me. Through the history of the world, there have been various religions, political systems, economic systems, philosophies that have come, gone, spread, affected life in good or bad ways. But none has been so pervasive, spread so widely, and is so potentially dangerous as consumerism, the idea that we must have more, bigger, newer, better to be happy.

I agree. Consumerism is, in the end, a very bad deal for everyone.

Let's stop listening to advertising agencies. We inherently know what we want and need. We don't need them to tell us.

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Along the same thought lines but from a different source is "proliferation". We usually hear the word in connection with "nuclear", but proliferation in general is very dangerous to the Earth, particularly proliferation of people. And consumerism.
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